Interview: Transforming the Language of Death

Stephen Jenkinson has been at the deathbed of more than a thousand people. He says death can be a wondrous and empowering mystery but we need to start talking about it differently.

“I don’t think the problem was that we weren’t talking about dying…the dilemma was, and has always been, and remains, what are we saying when we talk about dying?

The principle habits of the mind and the psyche are always manifest in the language…In a culture that’s allegedly speaking more and more about death all the time…The word ‘die’ doesn’t appear very often, the word ‘death’ even less, and ‘dead’ hardly at all.”

A former leader of a palliative care team, here Stephen shares his insights with Chip Richards from UPLIFT on how to support death to be a positive process.